I am mostly with Mike on this one. With the high level of uncertainty surrounding the virus and the widely differing reactions of governments, planning in the current calendar year is difficult at best. And who knows where the economy will be in 2021? Will we be still licking our wounds? Will American tourists, probably a large percentage in or near retirement, be comfortable spending £10k+ to cross the pond for a week? My suspicion is that they will wait a while. And as the Trust is likely to get a helping hand from the taxpayer, at a minimum, it should provide a full credit with an extended shelf life as suggested by Mike.
Re: how other travel related businesses are responding to these unchartered times, we had prepaid a long cruise around New Zealand, airline tickets, couple nights at an Auckland hotel, a half-dozen local tours and shore excursions. We got to the gate at LAX near midnight on the 13th for our second flight into Auckland. There we were told that the PM of NZ had just instituted the strictest travel restrictions in the world to-date and we were re-booked stand-by on the first flight back to Dallas (to add insult to injury, either TSA or the bag handlers broke a near new $280 Titleist bag that never made it out of the cover, and took an extra 24 hours to make it home).
The cruise line, Silver Seas, offered a full refund or a 125% credit on a future cruise good for two years (we took the refund which was immediate). All tour companies also refunded our money. American Airlines at first denied our request for a refund, but on appeal is reconsidering.
HotWire either shutdown access to the cancellation page on their website or was inundated by traffic that it crashed. Its response to my email to Customer Service was to reference the Frequently Asked Questions and Answers section on the website. My subsequent emails have gone unanswered. I suspect that my credit card company will provide some help, but we travel quite a bit and have been using HW regularly. Never again- BUYER BEWARE.